Business Audience Marketing Leader Bizo Secures $10 Million Series B Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Bizo, the global leader in business audience marketing, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series B equity financing expansion round led by Crosslink Capital's newest partner, David Silverman.  Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock also participated in the round. Bizo will use the funding to further expand its sales and marketing efforts and continue to extend its platform to support a fast-growing customer base.

Bizo offers brand advertisers a precise way to reach and engage business professionals online – through deep audience analytics, social media engagement and precision display ad targeting.  Today, more than 400 leading brands use the Bizo platform to reach their target audiences online.  Bizo recently announced strong momentum for 2011, ending the year with an annual run rate of over $18 million and increasing its year-over-year Q4 run rate by 133 percent – it has also continued momentum into 2012 with 125 percent year-over-year Q1 revenue growth.  The company also grew its targetable audience of online business professionals to more than 100 million monthly unique users in 2011, through the addition of more than 800 new publisher partners including Crains BtoB, PC World, Cygnus Media, TechMediaNetwork and Thomson Reuters, bringing its current partner ecosystem to over 2,000 business publishers.    

Bizo is also continuing to break new technology ground.  The Bizo Marketing Platform is now supporting over 45 billion monthly data requests, or approximately 35,000 requests per second at peak, which underscores not only the scalability of the platform the company has developed, but also the large ecosystem of customers and partners that use Bizo's platform to power their online marketing efforts. 

With this round of funding, Crosslink Capital's David Silverman will join the Bizo board of directors.  Silverman's previous investment experience includes BlueLithium (acquired by Yahoo!), Demand Media (DMD), Fotolog (acquired by Hi-Media), Omniture (OMTR; acquired by Adobe) and Speakeasy (acquired by Best Buy).  Bizo's board also includes Russell Glass, Bizo co-founder and CEO; Yonatan Stern, Bizo co-founder and ZoomInfo CEO; Byron Deeter, Bessemer partner and former IBM executive; Steve Ricci, Flagship Ventures senior partner; and Mike Tyrrell, Venrock general partner.

"Bizo was an attractive opportunity for Crosslink because the team has built Bizo into a fast-growing category leader in the business marketing industry, and they've done so in an incredibly capital-efficient way," said David Silverman, partner at Crosslink Capital. "I look forward to working with Russell and the Bizo team to build on these successes over the coming years."

"Bizo has seen extraordinary growth over the past few years and has positioned itself at the center of the business audience marketing ecosystem. This latest round of expansion capital is strong validation of the company's momentum and the opportunity ahead of us," said Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo.  "We're very pleased to have the support of David and the Crosslink Capital team as well as our existing investors as we accelerate our technology development and further solidify our leadership position in the market."

Bizo was founded in 2008 by Russell Glass and Yonatan Stern and has raised $20 million of equity and debt financing to date.  The executive team is comprised of serial entrepreneurs and leaders who bring a wealth of business audience marketing and ad industry experience from companies such as Zoominfo, Monster, SuccessFactors, Conde Nast, AdMob and Coremetrics. The company was ranked the fourth fastest-growing private company in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times.

About Crosslink Capital

Crosslink Capital is a leading stage-independent venture capital and growth equity firm with over $1.5 billion in assets. Crosslink, which traces its roots back to 1989, was among the first and largest investment firms in the U.S. to integrate public and private growth investing in three families of funds: venture capital funds, long/short hedge funds and a unique hybrid crossover fund. This strategy allows Crosslink to partner with its portfolio companies on a long-term basis. With more than 20 years behind it, Crosslink Capital has invested in over 100 private equity portfolio companies, at the early, mid, and late stages including Pandora, Ancestry.com, Equinix, SeaMicro (acquired by AMD), Intematix, Synapsense, Datastax and Bleacher Report. For more information on Crosslink, visit http://www.crosslinkcapital.com.

About Bizo

Bizo gives marketers instant access to the people who sign the checks at work, and have the most to spend on life: business professionals. Fueled by proprietary demographic data, the Bizo Marketing Platform precisely targets more than 100 million professionals around the world, including more than 80 percent of the U.S. business population.  Bizo has won the confidence of more than 400 brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, AT&T and UPS who use Bizo to exert inordinate influence and effectively target their online marketing programs to the business professional audience.

For more information on Bizo, or for a free look at the business demographics of your website audience, visit www.bizo.com.

SOURCE Bizo